I have read the instrucitons for fine tuning and just wouldn't feel comfortable attempting that myself and I am not really wanting to seny my camera away at the moment. I am going to return it as I am not happy with the results for the cost of the lens... now I can decide whether to order another one for a final try and just give up and keep what I have. I was really enjoying the range of the 16-85 too.

Penny, you should definitely return the lens. You are not imagining things! If you search DPreview or elsewhere you will find a lot of people discussing this focus problem with this lens. Still, many others seem to get excellent copies. Hard to say what's going on, but I know first hand the problem exists.

I can definitely understand your not feeling comfortable adjusting the AF calibration yourself, but I will tell you that it is highly effective on the D40. FOr people that only use the center focus point, it's one of the smartes moves you can make! I adjusted mine. With one turn of a screw you can pretty much match up your camera to any lens you want so that you AF will be near perfect *if* you use that lens (or any other lens with the same calibration offset). If you do this in your case, however, you may match your 16-85, but then your other lenses will be out of focus.

The only way to do it perfectly is to send all the lenses and camera to Nikon.